New
York, June 6, 2014--A local newsroom was burned down on Thursday in Donetsk
region in eastern Ukraine and a telecommunication company stopped broadcasting
content from six Ukrainian TV channels, citing threats, according to news reports and press freedom groups. In both cases,
separatists with the self-declared Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) were believed
to be the perpetrators, the reports said.

"The Committee to
Protect Journalists urges the self-appointed officials of the Donetsk People's
Republic to stop trying to silence the press," CPJ Europe and Central Asia
Program Coordinator Nina Ognianova said. "Threatening journalists and news
outlets and destroying a newsroom as punishment for editorial policy are
criminal acts--not political statements. We call on the Ukrainian government to
prosecute the perpetrators of these attacks to the full extent of the law."

On
Thursday night, assailants in the city of Torez threw Molotov cocktails at the offices
of Gornyak, a local newspaper, according to the independent news website
Telekritika and a local press freedom group.
The offices burned down, the reports said. Gornyak Editor-in-Chief Anatoly
Postnov told Telekritika that he
believed the attack was connected to his paper's coverage of regional events and
to the paper's editorial policy. He said separatists had come to the newsroom a
few days prior and demanded that the paper cover their activities favorably.
The journalists refused to comply and the separatists broke furniture, he said.

According
to Telekritika, assailants also broke in to Gornyak's newsroom on May 6 and
destroyed its furniture and reporting equipment over its refusal to comply with
separatists' demands to cover the referendum on independence of the region from
Ukraine.

In
a separate case, the Donetsk-based telecommunications company Matrix said on Thursday
that it stopped broadcasting programs by Ukrainian stations Channel 5, Channel
1+1, Donbass, UBR, Pervy Natsionalny, and News 24. Matrix published
a
letter from separatists it received on Sunday that accused the stations of
inciting ethnic and racial hatred, carrying propaganda, glorifying Nazism, and
distributing false information about the Donetsk People's Republic.

The
letter also said that if Matrix failed to comply with the separatists' demands,
the Donetsk People's Republic "would not guarantee the safety of the company's
property or its staff." The letter did not specify which broadcasts by the stations
were considered offensive.